


The Sound of a Heart

by Bespectacled_Panda



Category: PBG Hardcore
Genre: Alternate Universe - Real World, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Angst, Emotional Hurt, M/M, Major Character Injury, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, absurd amounts of space metaphors, also the ryzab is a side pairing not the main focus of the work, is that the right term? I'm looking for the scifi equivalent to low fantasy, low scifi, mostly realistic but with the tiniest scifi bent, this fic is best described as watching a train wreck in very slow motion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 20:28:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29106357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bespectacled_Panda/pseuds/Bespectacled_Panda
Summary: “It’s still me,” Stewart said softly, blinking slowly up at him. “I—it’s still me in here. I haven’t changed on the inside. I promise.”But it was just so hard to believe him when every word he spoke came out in a voice garbled and hardened by metal.---Or, McJones is in an accident. He gets better, but it’s not the same.Not in PBG’s eyes.
Relationships: Dean Elazab/Stewart Hargrave
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	The Sound of a Heart

**Author's Note:**

> **IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER – PLEASE READ:**
> 
> **This is a work of fiction.** I am in no way claiming to depict or otherwise comment on the real-life identities of anyone who appears in this work. The actions of the characters are the products of my imagination alone; they do not in any way belong to the real-life individuals and should not be interpreted as such. 
> 
> This story is set in a realistic-style world, and as such, the characters are referred to by their real names rather than their online nicknames, along with other similar changes. However, none of the words contained herein are intended to be interpreted as any reflection of actual reality. No attempt whatsoever was made to accurately depict the real lives of any of the people this story is about (with the slight exception of McJones’s career, which was completely accidental; I wrote him as an electrician in this story before discovering he also is an electrician in real life.)
> 
> Additionally, no disrespect whatsoever is intended towards any of the people featured in this work. This is especially directed towards McJones and Dean, as well as their respective, actual significant others, as I understand fully that I am depicting their relationship in a way that is completely inaccurate to real life. 
> 
> Finally, if you, the reader, are in any way affiliated with Hardcore, or if you have a personal relationship with anyone who is affiliated with Hardcore, I strongly urge you to stop reading now. I deeply value the boundary that separates fan from creator, and I have no desire to cross that.
> 
> Thank you for understanding.
> 
> \---
> 
> Anyway, to the rest of you, hello & welcome! This fic has been a long time coming. The idea first came to me in mid-August of 2020, & I foolishly believed I had what it took to bang out the entire thing in just a couple of days if I worked diligently. Obviously, that did not come even close to happening, but either way, I am here now, ready to finally break my year-long posting dry spell!
> 
> A few other housekeeping things to take care of before we get to the story:
> 
> 1\. This story contains an abundance of strong content, including but not limited to:  
> -clinical as well as graphic descriptions of injuries  
> -moderate but frequent body horror  
> -strong emotions & depictions of emotional trauma  
> -depression-esque poor mental health  
> If you are sensitive to any of these things—especially the point about trauma; this is not an emotionally-light story—please proceed with the necessary caution.
> 
> 2\. I don’t have a set schedule for updating this, but the entire fic is already completely written as well as somewhat edited, so all I really need to do is polish up the two remaining parts and then post. I’m hoping to have the story completed within the month, but I’m not sure how feasible that is. Just, don’t anticipate huge gaps in posting, because as I said, the story is totally done writing-wise.
> 
> 3\. On that note, as long as this part is, the other two are significantly longer, if you can believe that. I apologize for the ungodly length of this, but also I don't apologize too much because I have come to understand that this is just Who I Am, everything I write will end up like this whether I like it or not. 
> 
> 4\. This work uses a work skin! It's very simple, all it does is remove the default chapter headings & add indentations, which is just personal preference, but if you'd like, please enable your work skins to view this story the way ~~god~~ I intended!
> 
> And I think that's about it! I appreciate you bearing with me through this author's note, and I also thank you for being willing to read my story. I sincerely hope you enjoy it.

###### Part One – Atrial Systole

The call came on the sixth of June, two fifty-three in the afternoon.

Austin knows this off the top of his head because he scrolls back in his phone logs every so often and just stares at it. Stares at the incoming call symbol, a tiny silhouette of a wiggling receiver, so innocent and unassuming. Stares at that concrete, visual marker of when everything turned to ash.

He was working, he remembers. Seated at the kitchen table with his laptop flipped open in front of him, pecking away at some email or another to some coworker or another. The heat of summer hadn’t nearly hit its peak yet, so the windows and the back door were all thrown wide open to welcome in the warm afternoon breeze. It ghosted over him every so often as he sat there, filling him with a tranquil sort of contentment. He’d always felt a unique sort of fondness toward the summer—a remnant of his childhood days, probably, when summer meant freedom from homework and plenty of time to run around outside getting into whatever trouble suburban Texas in the late nineties could offer. And even now, when his workload stayed more or less steady year-round and he was far too old and out of shape to be doing any sort of running around, the feeling persisted.

It was nice; he was happy.

Other than the ambient murmurs of nature flitting in through the open windows, though, the house was quiet, Austin being by himself for the time being. It was actually meant to be a day off for Stewart, in truth, but he’d gotten called in unexpectedly for an emergency service that morning. “Some office building’s power went out, and apparently all the other guys are booked up,” Stewart had said just before he left a couple of hours prior, rolling his eyes as he laced up his work boots. “But I get to charge overtime rate, so it’s whatever.”

The wind whistled through the screen pulled shut across the open back door, mussing Austin’s hair. He combed it sloppily back into place with his fingers before reaching for his near-empty can of soda, perched sweatily atop a coaster. He tipped his head backwards as he gulped down the last of it and then stood, ambling off into the kitchen to toss the can and grab a new one from the fridge. He probably drank a little too much of the stuff, admittedly, but sue him, it was delicious.

As he pulled open the refrigerator, Austin heard the faint sound from back behind him of his phone beginning to vibrate with a call. Probably just Stewart asking if he should pick up anything for dinner while he’s out, he figured. They were kinda low on groceries, and also nobody else ever really called him anyway; Stewart was just kind of a square like that, always wanting to talk instead of text. So Austin just carelessly let the call fall to voicemail as he bent down and retrieved soda number three for the day from the bottom shelf of the fridge and then nudged the door closed with his knee.

But when he went sauntering back into the dining room, popping the tab of the can and bringing it to his lips to take a fizzy swig, his phone unexpectedly went off again, a second call following right up against the first with hardly even a pause between. That was odd; Stewart wouldn’t call again just for groceries, right? Austin felt a slight twinge of confusion in his chest, and he set down his soda on the coaster with a clunk and reached out for his phone. And when he slid it towards himself across the table, he saw, for the first time, that the screen was lit up not with Stewart’s name as he’d expected, but with _Mom._

Quickly, he jabbed his index finger against the green _answer_ button and brought the phone to his ear. “Hello?” he began unsurely.

A burst of static, and then his mother’s voice came through in a rush. “Oh— _Austin!_ Thank God. Thank _God_.”

And the sheer _desperation_ in her words made his stomach twist in on itself in a knot.

“Mom, what—what’s wrong?” he asked, slowly lowering himself back into his chair, feeling suddenly nauseous. His email sat on the screen of his laptop, unfinished, the cursor blinking and blinking and blinking. On the other end of the line, there was no response. “…Mom?”

“Austin,” his mother said again at last, sounding hollow, “I—”

Another pause. He could hear her breathing heavily into the receiver. His free hand balled into a tight fist in his lap. “Mom, what’s going on? Is—is everything okay?”

“I—there—there’s been an accident.” She made a raw, gasping sort of noise. “Your brother—”

And that, there, was the instant when Austin’s world collapsed.

It wasn’t Stewart’s fault, his mother said. It was the other driver—they lost control of their truck and jackknifed, swerving abruptly into the other lane. But it didn’t really matter in the end. The result, the outcome of a hulking truck meeting a flimsy little car at sixty-five miles per hour is always the same.

She was speaking rapidly, then, as if something had come unplugged within her, a frenzy of half-formed, half-intelligible statements rushing through the speaker of the phone. She threw around words like _severe, critical condition, trauma, blood loss,_ words that Austin could hardly process through the cloud of panic that had crushed his throat. It was all he could to do just stay grounded. He was barely conscious, barely aware of anything that was going on around him. He couldn’t feel or think or speak or even move. All there was was the word _accident_ rolling on loop through his mind.

_Accident._

_Accident._

_Accident._

“—But—but there is some good news!” his mother blurted without any warning, her tone turning towards this horribly forced sort of cheer. “The doctors say he’s the perfect candidate for those new-fangled bionics! The metal ones with the gears and—and the—” The words shuddered. “So—so they said they’re going to do e—emergency surgery, and—and hopefully—”

And she broke off sharply into a sob, her sentence fracturing altogether beneath the impossible weight of everything. A moment later, there came through the sound of a much deeper voice, mumbling to her in the background. His father, Austin thought dimly.

“ _Honey, please, let me have the phone._ ” More static, and then the voice came again, much clearer this time. “Austin?”

“D—Dad?”

It wasn’t even a word, really. Just a noise, a strangled gasp clawing its way from his mouth. On the other end, Austin’s dad was silent for what felt like an eternity.

“…Meet us at the hospital as soon as you can,” he said finally, sounding tight. And without waiting for a reply, he hung up, leaving Austin gripping the phone in his fingers so tightly he could have shattered it.

\---

Austin still doesn’t know how exactly he got to the hospital. It’s just a hole in his memory, even now. A gaping crater of lost time. All he knows is that one minute, he was sitting frozen in the dining room, nothing but a statue, and the next he was floating into the ER waiting room, feeling like a ghost in human skin. His parents were already there, seated side by side at two chairs in the corner of the room, their faces reading the exact same impossible, numb stew of emotion that Austin was submerged within. His father greeted him with a faint nod upon noticing his approach, but his mother didn’t react at all. She was just staring vacantly off into space, her eyes rent wide and her jaw clenched so tight Austin could see the muscle quivering beneath her skin. Austin stared at her for a moment before forcibly tearing his focus away and slowly lowering himself down beside them.

Someone must have messaged Dean at some point—perhaps it was even Austin himself—because he too came stumbling into the waiting room shortly thereafter, looking like he was about to vomit and mumbling something about Lucah giving him a ride. He all but crumpled into the empty chair on Austin’s other side, raking his hands through his already wild hair, and Austin said nothing to him, and neither did he in kind. Naturally so; there was nothing _to_ be said.

And then, the four of them waited. They waited, exchanging nary a word nor a glance amongst each other. They waited and waited and waited as the minute hand of the clock hung on the wall made nearly _nine_ excruciating revolutions about the centerpiece. Somewhere around hour three, a nurse came out to notify them of the status of the surgery, informing them that their team of talented surgeons was hard at work on Stewart and all was going well— _somehow_. But other than that, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing but the relentless ticking of the clock and the agony of the bleak, abject uncertainty hanging around their necks like nooses.

It was as if they had crossed over into a different realm entirely. Outside of the four walls of the hospital, reality carried on. The sun shone and the birds sang and that comfortable early-summer breeze continued to whoosh about. Even within the waiting room itself, the receptionists filed paperwork and tapped away on their keyboards, and the other visitors spoke in hushed voices and checked the clock every so often themselves. The world continued to turn, just the same as it always had. Everything was normal.

But within their little bubble, the space consumed by the four of them, those desolate few, there was none of that. It was as if any sense of life and being had left their bodies entirely, as if their skin itself no longer fit them right. They didn’t know how to even just _exist_ anymore. They had forgotten so, lost every last bit of it in the crash. Even merely sitting there, motionless, blind and deaf to the rest of the universe, they were only just barely managing to hold onto themselves.

Austin did get up once, a single time, perhaps during hour five or six, dragging himself off on wobbly legs to use the bathroom. And he looked glassily into the mirror as he washed his hands with soap that was a little too fragrant, taking in the haggard reflection that looked back at him with a haunted gaze. But aside from that, he barely even moved an inch from his stiff-backed position in his chair, gripping the armrests so hard his knuckles had gone the color of the bone beneath. _Accident_ , his mind screamed, having latched onto the only thing he could comprehend in all of this nightmare.

_Accident._

_Accident._

_Accident._

And it seemed that it was just same for the others. Dean sat there with his face in his hands, breathing a little bit like he was about to fall into a panic attack at any second. Austin’s father clutched a paper cup of water that he’d poured himself hours ago, refusing to set it down beside him but never once lifting it to take a single sip either. And his mother—she prayed. With her fingers entwined and her head bowed low, she prayed and prayed and prayed and didn’t stop praying for anything. “ _Please, God, save my son,”_ she begged in a quiet voice that felt like a shout in the silence of the waiting room. “ _Oh God, please._ ”

Finally, once those taunting hands of the clock had reached just shy of eleven thirty at night, a nurse—different from the one before—emerged from within the double doors at the other end of the room. “Hargrave?” she called out, the word cutting through the still air like a gunshot, and all four of them stiffened at once.

Austin’s father was the first to get to his feet. “Y—yes,” he said, lifting a hand. “We’re—that’s us.”

Weaving around the clusters of chairs filling the room, the nurse approached them in quick steps. “The surgery is finished, and the head surgeon wants to speak with you now regarding the details of the procedure. If you’ll follow me, please, I’ll take you to the consultation room,” she said curtly.

It was precisely what they had been waiting for, all this time, and yet, still, it felt bizarrely sudden to Austin. _Too_ sudden, even. Uncertainty was agony, yes, but at the same time, it was safe. Controlled. In uncertainty still lay the chance for escape. But once you crossed that threshold of knowledge, you could never turn back, no matter how horrible it was what you saw on the other side. And part of Austin, in that moment, was seized with the overwhelming urge to just…run. To run away. To turn tail and flee as fast and as far as he could and never stop. Maybe, if he pushed himself hard enough, he could’ve even outrun the truth itself.

But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He could barely even move, his skeleton feeling about to just buckle and give way altogether as he pushed himself heavily out of his chair as well. And he stood there with his legs locked together and his arms wrapped around his middle, his insides gone as cold and hard as a boulder.

Beside him, Dean began to draw up as well, but the nurse abruptly turned her businesslike stare onto him. “I’m sorry, but only immediate family is permitted to know the details of the procedure.”

Dean nodded tightly, wordlessly. His downcast eyes screamed pain as he lowered himself back down, folding his hands together tightly in his lap. And as Austin trailed after his parents as they, in turn, followed along behind the nurse through the waiting room, he found himself twisting back to cast a single, fleeting glance at Dean—at his quiet, desolate form folded into that chair like a flower left to wilt—before slowly turning away again and walking on.

The nurse led them back through the double doors into a wide, branching hallway. Taking a sharp left, they ventured down a narrow side corridor and stopped in front of a plain wooden door with a small window set into it. The nurse opened it for them with a _click_ and directed them inside, saying, “Please take a seat, the surgeon will be with you shortly.”

And then, she just unceremoniously left them there, truly alone this time as they sat around the table, trapped and suffocating in their own endless universe of grief.

Austin remembers that second period of waiting inexplicably being a thousand times more unbearable than the first, than the nine hours of hell they had just suffered through. He was so sick with anxiety, so sick in a deep, rotting way he couldn’t remember ever feeling in his life, his fingers shaking uncontrollably and his stomach lurching violently with a thousand _what if_ s. He wanted to cry, some part of him deep inside, but it was buried beneath layers upon layers of petrification. He felt like he had left half of his soul back at the house, back in the moment when his mother had spoken those fateful words to him— _there’s been an accident._

_There’s been an accident._

And as he sat there, falling deeper and deeper into the abyss, all he could think about was how he had just seen Stewart that morning. Just that morning, a set of memories so fresh and vivid in his mind it was as if they had taken place only minutes prior. He could see it all so clearly—Stewart getting the call from his supervisor in the midst of eating breakfast, how he propped his phone against his shoulder as he poked at his scrambled eggs with his fork. How his face sunk, sunk, and finally fell altogether as he listened, muttering out grudging affirmations that bordered on sarcasm. How he hung up forcefully and slammed his phone face-down on the table and shoveled down the rest of his eggs triple-time, bitching and moaning into them about the awesome day off he was _supposed_ to have. And, as he was just getting ready to walk out the door, all uniformed up with combed back hair, how Austin called out to him—“Charge those fuckers out the ass,” he’d said with a devilish grin, because he’d seen Stewart’s overtime rates, and _yikes_.

And, most of all, he remembers how Stewart paused with the front door halfway open. How he turned, how he looked back at Austin, and how he _smiled_. How he smiled so warm and so happy, his cheeks and eyes crinkling both in that familiar, toothy, _older brother_ way that Austin had grown to know so well. And how he was so alive and whole and _okay_ , and how everything was so normal, just like any other day, and how it was so normal that Austin hardly even thought about him after he left, and how while he was guzzling soda and lazily tapping out emails at home, Stewart was out there driving down the highway, and the truck driver in the next lane over was starting to lose control, and oh god, Austin was going to throw up.

Then, there came a knock at the door, so loud and sudden that Austin almost passed out from the startle of it. And second later, the door itself came cracking open.

“Hargrave?”

But, not waiting for a reply, a tall, somewhat plump man in a white coat slipped into the room, shutting the door carefully behind himself once more. Approaching the small table in the center of the room, he held out a hand, smiling thinly as he shook with each of the three of them in turn. He offered a brief introduction that Austin forgot almost as soon as it passed through his ears, and then, at last, he took a seat on the side of the table opposite them and laced his fingers together in front of him. And another thing Austin remembers, so crystal-clear even now, is the feeling of overwhelming powerlessness and dread that came over him as he looked into the surgeon’s nondescript face. The surgeon who already knew everything that they were still yet waiting to hear.

“Now,” the surgeon began, clearing his throat. Immediately jumping to the point. “The procedure was an overwhelming success. We were able to salvage forty-six percent of your son’s original body.”

And any joy or relief Austin might have felt from the first statement was wholly negated by the second.

Forty-six percent. _Forty-six percent_.

The sheer flash of physical pain it sent through him was so great that, for an instant, he was certain that he had been shot. That if he peered downwards, he would have found his heart in tatters and his blood gushing down his chest and pooling on the too-bright linoleum tile under his shoes.

That was less than half. They had saved less than half of Stewart’s body.

—No, not saved, _salvaged_ , like he was some sort of fucking car at the junkyard being pillaged for scrap metal. _Salvaged_.

Austin didn’t—couldn’t, _wouldn’t_ —look at his parents beside him, didn’t turn to see with his own eyes how they were taking the news. But he could sense, just through the air about them alone, that they were feeling the same sort of stunned devastation that he was. Several long moments passed, and then his mother was the one who finally broke the silence:

“…I—i-is—is that bad?” she asked timidly, fearfully.

And Austin also remembers how the doctor appeared, bewilderingly so, almost _surprised_ by the question. “Oh, no, not at all,” he answered quickly, in a tone of voice that felt far, far too casual for the situation. “That was magnitudes of order more than we expected considering his…” he pauses, just for a flicker, “… _condition_ when he arrived in the ER. And, in fact, this sort of procedure is only ever considered for people with less than fifty-five percent salvageability—patients for whom reconstructive-type surgery would be minimally effective or altogether impossible—so he’s at the higher end of the spectrum, really.”

Salvageability. Austin hated that term so much. He hated it with every fiber of his being. Not just because it drew attention to how little of Stewart remained, but because it forced him to think about how bad things must have been for over half of Stewart’s body to be _literally_ _unsalvageable._ His hands fisted in the hem of his shirt so tightly that it hurt, but he didn’t stop. He couldn’t. He—he needed something, _anything_ , to do with himself. He was going to fucking lose it.

“Most notably, his brain appears to have been largely undamaged,” the surgeon went on. “He did sustain a mild concussion, but he should be able to heal from that as one would normally. That is the biggest area of concern when we perform this sort of surgery, as the brain can’t sustain any more than minor replacements before we see severe loss of quality of life. A metal brain doesn’t work the same as a real one, you know. We’re not quite there yet.” He smiled thinly. “But, fortunately, you don’t have to worry about that.”

 _Fortunately_ , he said. As if anything about this situation was even remotely in the realm of fortunate.

“As for what _was_ damaged though, because of the way in which the accident presumably took place, the majority of the trauma occurred to the left side of his body, primarily centered in and around his head and upper torso.”

And then, the surgeon proceeded to run through his laundry list of every single piece of Stewart that fell into that lost fifty-four percent. Every single piece of him that had to be replaced in the nine hours he was under the knife. Every single piece of him that was _unsalvageable_. And Austin wanted so badly to press his hands over his ears and shut out every bit of it. He didn’t want to know, _he didn’t want to know_ , he felt like he was going to implode if he had to sit here and listen to all the horrible, horrible details. And yet, there was nothing he could do but exactly that. The surgeon’s voice flowed through him, unstoppably, like a flood, no matter how he tried to block it out. And he somehow processed none of it at all and all of it at once. Nothing and everything alternating within him, back and forth, back and forth, until he was absolutely sick with it.

 _Part of his skull and one-half of his face, including his left eye_.

_His left arm up to his shoulder and three-fifths of his ribcage._

_Two sections of his trachea and one of his vocal cords._

_A large majority of the skin on the left side of his body, around to the front of his chest and reaching down to his abdomen and upper leg._

Every word the surgeon said was another nail in Austin’s throat. Every time it seemed like he was done, he would keep going. On and on and on he went, and worse and worse and worse it got. Until forty-six percent sounded like a dream. Until Austin could hardly imagine that there was even _that_ much of Stewart still there, with everything of him that had apparently been cut away and discarded, scraped off like leftovers on a dinner plate.

Just that morning, Austin had seen him. Just that morning, Stewart had been whole, complete, one hundred percent of a person. It was just that morning, just fourteen short hours ago. But now, a mere half a day later, he wasn’t even half a person anymore. And that other more-than-half of him that used to be there—it was gone. Destroyed. _Unsalvageable_. Austin would never see it again.

Ever.

But despite everything, despite the haze of horror wrapped around Austin’s panicked mind, he found himself instantly yanked back down to Earth when he heard the doctor speak the words, “The only complication we encountered was regarding his heart.”

And the room, truly, seemed to shrink in on all of them.

“His heart,” Austin’s father repeated quietly, not exactly a question.

“Yes.” The surgeon nodded lightly. “As a result of the accident, it seems that he sustained a significant amount of blunt force trauma to his heart. This resulted in a myocardial contusion, which is essentially a bruising of the heart muscle. Sometimes, this is simply a normal bruise with no additional injury, but often what we see—and what did occur in your son’s case—is the resulting disruption of the heart’s natural rhythm.

“Unfortunately, one difficult thing about myocardial contusions is that arrythmias can take quite a bit of time to actually manifest from the point when the trauma occurs, which is what happened here.” The surgeon frowned slightly, pushing up his glasses with a finger. “Several hours into surgery, he suddenly began experiencing ventricular fibrillation—meaning the ventricles of his heart ceased to contract normally and instead began a sort of irregular shaking motion, which prevents blood from being properly pumped through the body. As a result of this, he rapidly entered cardiac arrest and soon reached the point of clinical death.”

Clinical death.

Austin’s blood turned to lead.

But the surgeon carried on without even slowing, utterly oblivious to the bombshell he had just dropped upon them. The way he had absolutely pulverized all three of them at once beneath the force of his words.

“Luckily, we were able to resuscitate him in good time—the likelihood of brain damage begins to increase drastically beginning at around five to six minutes following secession of breathing, but he was well beneath that, at just over three minutes from death to successful resuscitation.” The surgeon nods again, seemingly more to himself than to any of them. “From there, the emergency decision was made to perform a bionic heart transplant to avoid additional complications as a result of the arrythmia. We carried out cardiopulmonary bypass and then were able complete the transplant with little issue, overall.

“Over the next week or so, we will be closely monitoring your son for—among a variety of other things—signs of rejection, but bionic hearts have a vastly lower rate of rejection than organic hearts, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” He lifted a finger. “In fact, I wouldn’t worry too much about any of this. As I said, the surgery was a great success, and I am very, very pleased with what we were able to do for your son. I expect that he should make a complete recovery and be able to return to normal life in due time with minimal difficulty.”

And then, the surgeon smiled from across the table, and Austin felt like he’d fallen head-first into the twilight zone. It was such a viscerally disturbing reaction to him that he was almost _angry_ with it. How could this man sit there and _smile_ at them after everything he’d said? In one breath, he had told them that Stewart had just fucking _died_ on his operating table, and in the very next, he was acting like everything was just _fine_ , just _hunky-dory_ , _no problemo here!_

Bullshit.

Austin’s hands were curled over the sides of his chair now, and he could feel himself shaking, not from without, but from _within_ , from somewhere deep in the folds of his soul. Next to him, his father shifted, leaning forward slightly and rubbing his chin with his fingertips.

“So, Stewart is…really going to be okay?”

It was a more tranquil, more tactful expression of the same disbelief Austin was drowning beneath. And the surgeon was silent for a moment, tilting his head askew as he studied at them all with a single sweep of his gaze.

“…I understand that this is probably overwhelming for you, hearing the extent of your son’s injuries,” he answered slowly. Falling, for the first time, out of the medical babble. “It can be very difficult to…reconcile, I suppose, the severity of the accident with the more or less optimistic prognosis. But you must realize that comprehensive bionics as a field of medicine is specifically, by its nature, limited to patients with catastrophic injuries that would otherwise be certainly fatal. It’s a practice that arose to give people like your son a second chance by crafting them a new body to fit alongside what can be salvaged of their own. Moreover, I have operated on patients in much, much more severe condition than Stewart. My lowest was twenty-seven percent salvageability, if I recall correctly. So he is far from the worst case I have seen in my time.” The surgeon nodded for the thousandth time— _fucking bobblehead_ , Austin thought all at once, unexplainably. “And I believe, from my years of experience with these sorts of procedures, that his recovery will be smooth, swift, and complete.”

Austin glanced at his parents out of the corner of his eye as they quietly contemplated this.

“…I am…glad to hear that. I hope the same,” his father replied at last, and he let out a deep breath as he bowed his head. “And thank you so much for what you’ve done. You—you’ve saved our son.”

“Yes, there are no words to express how grateful we are,” his mother echoed, running her knuckles beneath her lower lids.

Austin just said nothing at all.

Following that, the surgeon somehow managed to produce even more things to blather on to them about, first explaining the hospital’s visitation policy at length and then offering them a pamphlet going into further detail about the things that they had done to Stewart—a pamphlet entitled _Comprehensive Bionics and Your Loved One_ that featured a picture of a smiling man with a shiny, bronze jaw connected to tanned skin that Austin took one glimpse at and instantly wanted to tear to shreds.

And then, finally, they were free. The surgeon once again thanked them for their patience, and then they stood up, shuffling out of the consultation room and back into the narrow hallway, where they watched the retreating back of the surgeon as he strode away from them and around the corner. But they themselves simply remained hovering in place for a long while, their skulls too thick to even so much as take a single step. And all around them swirled the faint sounds of beeping and clicking and urgent murmuring—the typical but unsettling ambience of a hospital that Austin had become so overfull with over the past hours.

“…Well,” Austin’s father said eventually, the first once brave enough to speak among the three of them. And then he was silent, silent for long enough that Austin thought that maybe that was all he had in him. But then, abruptly, he continued: “I guess—if Stewart’s going to be recovering in the PACU for the next couple of hours, I guess we can just go back to the waiting room and stay there until they tell us we’re allowed to go see him. Maybe we’ll see if there’s a vending machine around or something for us to get a bite to eat.”

It was the easiest topic of discussion out of everything that was lying in pieces all around their feet: figuring out what to do in their immediate future. The basics, the facts, the things that didn’t require much thought at all. A tiny, indistinct path among a massive forest of upended-ness none of them had the strength to confront, not then, not standing listlessly in the middle of a hospital hallway long after midnight.

Austin’s mother bobbed her head in agreement, the harsh overhead lights drawing out the weariness upon her face. Then, unexpectedly, she turned to look at Austin. “I imagine you’re going to wait with us, then?” she asked him, the end of her voice dipping up just enough.

“I—”

Austin stilled, looking back at both of his parents staring expectantly at him. And like a shot, that feeling from before, that feeling of wanting to run away and hide, surged over him once more with a vengeance. He had spent the past nine hours waiting with bated breath and unabating terror to hear the fate of his brother, but now that he finally had it, he…

“I mean…” he started, mumbling out the words on sleepy lips, “it’s kinda late. And if it’s going to be several more hours, I might just…” he shrugged imperceptibly, not meeting their eyes, “…tomorrow. Plus, I think I gotta give Dean a ride home, so…”

None of those were lies. They just…weren’t the whole truth. Which was, he was suddenly absolutely fucking terrified to see Stewart. The picture the surgeon had painted for them was done up in cheery, colorful pastels and sprinkled over with glitter, but nothing of that actually changed the fact that it was a portrait of an absolute nightmare. And Austin had already lived through so many waking nightmares that day that he didn’t have the capacity to take on any more. He just couldn’t, even if he had wanted to. Which, he didn’t. But he also couldn’t.

He was slightly afraid that his parents were going to challenge him or pressure him or otherwise object to his avoidance, but all they did was nod. “Alright, that’s fine, go on and get Dean and yourself home,” his father said. “We’ll see you tomorrow, then. I hope you’re able to get some sleep in the meanwhile. We’ll let you know how Stewart is when they let us in to see him.”

 _Don’t bother_ , Austin almost said, but he held it back. Instead, his only reply was a limp wave of his hand and a, “Yeah, 'night,” before he turned and began his slow trek back down the hallway once more.

\---

“I’ll drive you home,” was all Austin said to Dean when he returned to the waiting room, and Dean immediately leapt up without a word of objection nor affirmation. But Austin could tell that it was just an act born of politeness; no, he could sense the way Dean was absolutely bursting at the seams with questions for him. And that suspicion was confirmed right as soon as they slid into Austin’s car in the darkened parking lot:

“So—what happened? H-how is he? What did the doctor say?” Dean’s voice was frail, hesitant, almost as if he was afraid to know. “Is—is he…”

But Austin was just silent as he shoved his keys in the ignition and stretched his seatbelt over his middle. Dean’s words reverberated in his mind like a thunderclap, but he somehow couldn’t bring himself to respond right away. He just sort of…didn’t know what to say. How to conceptualize it and put it into words that another human being could comprehend.

“…Austin?” Dean pressed after a few seconds, his shoulders hunched and his chin lowered.

“He died.”

It came out unexpectedly, stilted and abrasive and far too loud for the quiet space. And it was only a fraction, a tiny little piece of everything that had happened over the course of that day, just one bullet point in the mental list of everything that goddamn surgeon had pulled them aside to tell them.

But it was it what haunted Austin most of all by far.

Not the forty-six percent. Not the missing eye and amputated arm. Not even the broken heart ripped out of his chest and transplanted away. No, the part that truly made Austin feel like he was going out of his mind as he sat there, in his idling car in a hospital parking lot in the middle of the night, was that there was a period of time where his brother was dead. Just…dead. No mincing words, no two ways about it. His heart stopped, his breathing stopped, for the span of three full minutes, he may as well have been no different than a corpse already laid to rest.

But it only set in, the broader meaning of what he'd said, when he saw Dean’s face go sharply slack, all the blood draining from his skin in a rush.

“No,” he cut in bluntly before Dean could reply, “clinically. Clinically dead. In surgery. But they brought him back. And he’s fine, now, or whatever.”

Dean stared at him with haunted eyes. And he swallowed, pulling at his seatbelt, turning away.

“—I mean. Not _fine_ , obviously. But the surgery was…good or whatever. He’s alive. They fixed him. And the surgeon said he’s gonna be okay. I guess. Someday.”

He trailed off. For a moment, Dean still just looked at him, face flashing a thousand different emotions in rapid succession. His mouth was open slightly, the halted start of a word that never quite made it to fruition. And then, all at once, he just crumbled. He fell in on himself, curling forward into his knees and burying his face in his hands, fingers clawing their way into his hair.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he whispered hoarsely, shakily, as if his voice was only barely managing to hold itself up. “Fuck, okay. He—he’s alive. He’s alive.” He rocked forward slightly, drawing in a ragged gasp. “I—when y-you said—when you said that he was—I just—”

And then he made a wet, gasping sort of sound into his palms, his shoulders quivering forcefully. And Austin prayed to god that he wasn’t actually crying, because he absolutely could not deal with that right then. He couldn’t deal with Dean’s emotions on top of his own. He was little more than a lopsided collection of body parts and organs heaped together, one slight gust of wind from being reduced to just rubble scattered across the ground. He had no strength left with which to bear anything at all.

So, without another word or glance at Dean, he started the car, backed out of the parking spot, and began the drive back to Dean’s apartment.

The roads were near-empty, cloaked in a heavy, moonless sort of shadow that pressed in on Austin as he drove. The unsettling eeriness of it, of the darkened storefronts and houses that blurred past and the vacant intersections he cruised through, did little to push away the sensation that this was all some sort of parallel universe he had fallen into. Maybe, when he got home and went to bed, he would wake up the next morning and find Stewart sitting at the table eating breakfast like he was supposed to be. Maybe he would find that this was merely some sort of vivid hallucination he’d been cursed with. He had always kinda believed it to be a cliché, the idea that people would go so far as to question the nature of their reality in a time of crisis. But now, now he understood. He understood. He would buy it, easily, the idea that this could be all just a dream.

Of course, he knew it wasn’t, but.

As Austin sat idling, waiting for a red light he gotten caught at to turn, it was then that Dean finally sat himself back up. Slowly, tentatively, he unfolded himself, letting his arms drop and his frame fall limply against the back of his seat. He sniffed hard, scrubbing a fist across his face once, and then let out a long, shaky sigh into the still air.

“So,” he started weakly, cutting through the hush for the first time in several minutes. “What did they…do? In surgery. They said they were gonna do the—those bionics, right? How…does that work? What does it mean for him?”

The nearby streetlights reflected off his hair and glasses as he gazed over at Austin. He looked tired, so tired, with bags under his slightly red-rimmed eyes and a scattering of stubble across his jawline and upper lip. And Austin too had been that same sort of exhausted about four hours ago, but by that point, he had progressed so far past the line of _tired_ that he was just…numb. Unfeeling. His body had shut down altogether, overloaded with all that had been piled up onto him. He could barely think, which was just as well, because he knew if he stopped to truly contemplate everything that had happened, he would cave in.

“Yeah,” he answered after a lengthy pause, looking back to the blackened road before him. The light went green, and he slowly pressed down on the gas and accelerated through the intersection. “They just…I guess, they got rid of all the parts of him that were _unsalvageable_ and replaced them with metal ones. Shit like his arm and his face and his ribs.” His jaw ticked. “And his heart.”

Dean sucked in a sharp breath that felt like knives, even to Austin. “Wait, jesus, it—it’s _that_ _much_ of him?”

“Yep.”

“I—I thought—” Dean cut off for an instant, the sound dying in his throat. Slowly, he turned away, staring out the passenger’s side window. Out of the corner of his vision, Austin saw him cross his arms tightly over himself. “…Okay, well,” he said very, very quietly, so quietly that Austin could hardly even hear him. “At least he’s alive. At least he’s alive, that’s all I really…”

It seemed like he was talking more to himself than to Austin at all. So Austin didn’t respond—although, in truth, he probably wouldn’t have responded even if Dean _had_ been talking to him. He was quickly learning that his choice of coping method wasn’t bonding with others over shared tragedy. Then again, though, it wasn’t like anything he’d done for the past nine hours could be even remotely construed as _coping_. It was more like _survival_ , just making it through each second of each minute of each hour. Like a shark, swimming and swimming on because you know you’ll sink and die if you don’t.

Another minute or so of silence went by. Austin stared straight ahead, taking in the cracked asphalt bathed in the path of his high beams as it was pulled beneath the body of the car. Mentally, he found himself ticking through the checklist of stuff he had planned to take care of that day, all the things on his plate before everything went to shit. He still had that email to finish writing, and there was also a bunch of other work stuff he wanted to get out of the way. Plus, the living room needed vacuuming and the laundry needed running, and fuck, he was hungry, he realized. His dad had the right idea wanting to go hunt for a vending machine; he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since that soda just before his mother called. And there was barely any food in the house as it was, because Stewart hadn’t picked up anything while he was out because he was—

“Did…you hear anything about visiting hours?” Dean spoke up again, pulling Austin abruptly from his thoughts. “Do you know wh—when I’ll be able to see him…at all?”

“Not until he’s out of the ICU. It’s immediate family only ‘till then,” Austin said, eyes still fixed firmly upon the road. He slowed slightly as he rounded a bend, his headlights glinting off the yellow warning sign stuck in the ground.

“Oh. How—how long will he be there?”

“Fuck if I know.” Austin licked his lips. “Maybe three days, maybe three weeks. Maybe forever.”

He didn’t know why he was being so harsh, it was just sort of…happening. But he also wasn’t really trying to stop it either. Honestly, he kind of wanted Dean to just shut the fuck up and let him drive in peace. His patience was long gone.

“Oh,” Dean murmured again, pushing his hair back off of his forehead. “Okay. I—” He broke off, swallowing audibly. “—Goddamn it. God, Austin. _God._ It’s _killing_ me. It’s killing me that I can’t see him. Like, he’s there, and he’s hurting, and he’s been through so fucking much, but I can’t—I can’t do anything for him. I can’t make it better. I can’t even fucking _try_.”

He dragged his palms harshly down his face and then tipped his head back, blinking vacantly up at the ceiling of the car. And Austin still wasn’t looking directly at him, and he had exactly zero intention to.

“I know it’s for his own good, I know if he gets too many people visiting him, that’s—he needs his rest, but—” Dean made a noise, indecipherable, but born of pure frustration and grief, “—I just—I _love_ him, Austin. I love him so much. He means the world to me. Why—why _can’t_ I be his family? Why _can’t_ I be part of the special few who get to see him no matter what? Why _can’t_ I be there to support him in this? I…” He let out a fraught, watery sigh. “I don’t know. I’m just…it’s so fucking hard.”

This wasn’t at all a conversation Austin wanted to be having. Even the current circumstances aside, it had always been awkward for him to hear about Stewart and Dean’s relationship. He was less than interested in knowing about his older brother’s love life; it was just kind of gross to think about Stewart like that. But somehow, it was made so much worse with everything that happened, so much worse in a way Austin couldn’t quite put a name to, and he felt something inside of him knot so intensely it was almost like he’d been stabbed. His knuckles tightened around the steering wheel, but, once again, he didn’t reply.

And after that, by some miracle, Dean seemed to finally pick up on Austin’s reticence to make conversation, because the rest of the drive was completed in pure, relieving silence. It was only when Austin pulled up into the parking lot of Dean’s small apartment complex and came to a stop by the curb that either of them acknowledged the other again.

“Thanks for the ride,” Dean said as he unbuckled himself, reaching to push open the passenger’s side door.

“Of course,” Austin replied thinly.

In a fluid motion, Dean slid his legs around and hopped out into the night air, turning to glance back into the depths of the car at Austin. And he lifted his hand in a halfhearted gesture, his lips twisting into something that resembled a weakened smile.

“G’night, man.”

Austin nodded. “’Night.”

With that, Dean turned, unsteadily trudging up the walkway towards the front door of the building. But Austin didn’t wait to see if he made it inside safely before just shifting into drive and peeling away.

\---

In the back of his mind, Austin was slightly worried about the possibility of having trouble falling asleep that night, kept wide-awake by the horrors of everything that had happened, but it was actually just the opposite: He passed out almost the instant his head hit the pillow, and he slept hard, not once stirring until his eyes slid open at the crack of eleven-thirty.

And for a handful of seconds, everything was okay. Reality was still there, looming shadowed in the distance, but it was held off by the seawall of sleepiness. Austin lay under the solid, comforting warmth of his covers, staring blearily out across his room from beneath heavy lids, his pillow soft and yielding beneath him. The sunlight streamed in through the gaps on either side of his curtains in beams. He could hear birds chirping faintly from outside his window. Seemed like it was going to be another nice day. Maybe he’d ask Stewart if they could—

And then, the tsunami came crashing down upon him, and he went cold beneath his blankets.

Everything rushed back to him at once—the accident, the hospital, the surgeon, the nightmare of it all. He felt himself begin to tremble slightly, from deep inside of himself, and he squeezed his eyes back shut for a moment. But he knew there was no putting it off; he had to rise to meet it, no matter how badly he wanted to pull the covers over his face and block out the real world forever.

Sitting up with a grunt, Austin scrabbled for his phone, lying face-down on the nightstand beside him. When he clicked on the screen and squinted into it, holding it close to his face to account for his current lack of glasses or contacts, he saw he had one missed call and one voicemail, both from his mother. He fingered in his passcode, tapped on the notification, and then hit the speakerphone button, flopping back down against his pillow to listen as it played.

“Hi, Austin,” came his mother’s voice, tinny and slightly distorted. “It’s your mother. We—we just left the hospital, and we’re in the car now driving home. We just spent about fifteen minutes visiting with Stewart, and—” And suddenly, she laughed, a startled, disbelieving, yet _genuine_ sound. “Oh, it’s a miracle, Austin. The surgeon was right; he—he’s really going to be alright. He was very groggy when we saw him, but…he knew who we were and he knew what happened and he smiled at us and—and he asked about you, Austin. He wanted to see you. It…”

She trailed off and was silent for a stretch. Then, abruptly, she cleared her throat, exhaling into the receiver.

“…Well, it—it’s after two in the morning now, so your father and I are going to go home and get some rest. But we’re planning to go back to the hospital first thing tomorrow, when ICU visiting hours start at eleven, so hopefully you’ll be able to meet us there, and we can see him again—as a family. Alright?” She paused again, and Austin could actually _hear_ the hopeful smile on her face in the silence. “Bye, then!” she finished at last. “I love you.”

And that was the end of the message. Austin was stone-still as her words settled into him. Something about the whole thing made his insides clench fiercely. It was the same sort of thing as before—despite everything, despite the overwhelming grimness of the situation, they were still saying that Stewart was okay. That he was going to be fine, no question of it. That this comprehensive bionic whatever-the-fuck was some sort of magic bullet that would erase all of the damage of a horrific car accident. Coming from his mother rather than just the surgeon, the insistence of it was a little harder to disregard, but Austin just couldn’t even fathom that Stewart’s condition was anything _close_ to what might be considered _alright_.

But then again, either way, he would soon see for himself.

Shortly thereafter, he summoned the will to get out of bed and get himself cleaned up, showering and shaving and brushing his teeth before stumbling off to the kitchen in search of something that could pass as breakfast. Last night, all he’d had was an apple, standing over the sink, bleary eyed, as he gnawed it down to his core, and so he was absolutely ravenous by that point. Or, he _would_ have been had anxiety not absolutely killed his appetite. Though he hadn’t eaten a proper meal for nearly an entire day, his stomach felt tight and sick, lurching violently at the thought of putting anything at all into it. But he forced himself to sit down and have a bowl of cereal anyway, the bites of soggy Cheerios feeling almost like slugs as they slid wetly down his throat.

Then, he pocketed his phone, shoved his heels into his already-laced shoes, and hopped into his car to make the now-familiar drive to the hospital.

He was halfway there when it finally occurred to him that he was probably supposed to have something to give to Stewart when he first saw him. People usually bring flowers when someone’s in the hospital, he thought to himself idly. But giving his own brother flowers would be kinda weird. So, after a bit of contemplation, he decided on just picking up a card of some sort and calling it good enough.

But the dollar store’s selection of get-well cards was underwhelming to say the least. All of them felt so… _mundane_. Just, like, _hope you feel better soon!_ That sort of sentiment didn’t really feel applicable in a situation like the one Austin was about to walk into. He was looking for less _sorry you got the flu_ and more _sorry you got run over by a truck and lost half of your body._ Maybe they had one of those lying around somewhere in the back.

And then, as the thought crossed through his mind, he found himself huffing out with a rough, dried-up chuckle. It wasn’t really a funny joke at all—it was mostly just dark and kind of really horrible, honestly. But somehow, it amused him anyway. And it was the first tinge of anything resembling happiness that he had felt in close to a day, so he’d take it.

He ended up just deciding on some random card with a cat on it. Stewart liked cats. He’d been on Austin’s ass to get one for so long, so maybe he’d appreciate the gesture. Or something. It would do, at the very least. Once back in the car, Austin balanced it on his thigh as he scribbled some short and snappy message on it with a pen he fished out from the glove box. And then, tossing it onto the passenger’s seat along with the pen, which immediately rolled off the seat and onto the floor, he backed out of the parking lot and got back on the road.

It was a different part of the hospital that day—not the ER, but the main visitors’ entrance around the other side of the building. When Austin walked through the door, he was met with a shiny, spacious entryway with a small front desk a short distance away. There, he was directed to show his ID, sign in, and stick a paper visitor’s badge provided to him by the receptionist onto his shirt. It was a very different atmosphere than the previous night—a bustling hub of activity rather than a small, silent waiting room—but Austin wasn’t sure if it was a good change or not. It felt more like a lateral movement than anything else, trading one extreme for the other. The brightness of the lights reflecting off the tiled floor; the clangor of machines and footsteps and voices; and that strong, off-putting _medical_ smell—all of it hitting him at once was borderline overwhelming to him, tightening around his throat and slitting a sword through his gut.

The receptionist had given him Stewart’s exact floor and room number, but rather than trying to find it himself in the maze of hallways and wings that the hospital seemed to consist of, Austin just texted his mother. _I’m here_ , he tapped out, simple enough, and then plunked himself down on a bench to wait for her reply. His heart was sort of pounding, he realized as he sat there, leaning back against the wall with his legs linked at the ankles. Just a slight sort of elevated pulse, a subtle panic that underscored his every movement and thought. He swallowed tightly, shoving his hands into his pockets and trying to mentally will himself to be calm. _It’s okay_ , he told himself, _it’s just Stewart. It’s just Stewart_.

Or, at least, he hoped it was.

That was what he was afraid of, above all, really. That whatever lay beyond the door of room 424 in the ICU wasn’t going to be Stewart anymore. That it was only going to be forty-six percent of the brother he once knew. And the what was left over, that remaining fifty-four percent, would be—

—Well, Austin didn’t want to let himself think about that.

He didn’t have long to wait before his parents located him. He stood quickly to meet them as they rounded the corner, both of them smiling with pure, undiluted joy in their eyes and visible ease in their postures. For some reason, the sight of their happiness made Austin feel like the floor was giving way beneath him. Giving way very, very slowly, but giving way all the same.

They had just come from Stewart’s room, they said, and they would walk with him on the way back so he knew where to go. But then, if it was alright with him, they were planning to go get something to eat in the hospital cafeteria, and so they would leave him and Stewart to have some time alone as brothers. Austin didn’t know if it was better or worse to have them gone, so he just nodded along and said nothing of his own.

“I don’t blame you for not wanting to try and find your way around this place,” his mother remarked with a titter as they stood in an elevator carrying them up to the fourth floor. “We had to ask two different nurses which way the ICU was, and still it took us almost ten minutes to figure out where to go! Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Austin said, mustering a weak smile when she glanced over at him. If his internal distress was obvious, she didn’t comment on it.

The elevator dinged softly, and the doors slid open to reveal another long, bright hallway, just the same as all the others. _Intensive Care Unit_ , read a sign hanging from the ceiling, along with an arrow pointing dead ahead. Austin trailed a step or two behind his parents as they proceeded out of the elevator and set off on the journey down the hall, feeling as if he had finally crossed some point of no return. The numbers of the doors lining the walls counted up and up and up as they passed— _402, 404, 406—_ closing in, inescapably, on their fate. Most of the doors were shut tight, but a few of them were ajar, and, passing them, Austin kept his eyes pointed forward and tried very, very hard not to let himself catch even a glimpse of the rooms beyond.

And then, much too quickly, they were there, standing in front of unlucky door number 424. It as well stood cracked open, a small slice of sunlight spilling through the gap between the door itself and the frame. As Austin’s eyes traced the edges of the light, he felt his heart claw its way into his esophagus. Beside him, his dad folded his arms and settled back against the wall, while his mother pressed her palms together and blinked up at Austin.

“Well, here we are!” she announced brightly. “You can go right on in. He’s waiting for you; we told him that you were here already.” She beamed at him, her graying hair bobbing with her eager nods. “He’s much more awake now than he was last night, and he’s very, very excited to see you.”

But Austin didn’t move. He just stood in place, stiff-backed and tense-shouldered, as if some sort of tree roots had sprouted from within the ground and wrapped themselves all around his ankles. And he saw, after a moment, his mother’s smile start to wane, dripping away from her lips like the tip of a lit candle.

“I—” she began and then stopped, exhaling suddenly through her nose. Her eyebrows knitted together, and she took a step closer to Austin, her voice dropping down to a hush. “…I will say, it is a little bit…shocking to see him for the first time. It’s not really a…subtle procedure.” She laughed, sort of, but it was mirthless, just a single chuckle bursting its way out of her. “The bionics are—they’re honestly very noticeable. It’s a shame they can’t make them out of anything other than metal.”

Those were not the words Austin would have liked to hear. Not at all. He pressed his lips together, his arms crossing defensively over his chest and fingers gripping his opposite elbows, as if he could have shielded himself from the reality that he was voluntarily rising to meet.

“And—and he sounds a little bit different now, because of the artificial vocal cord and all,” his mother went on, her tone somehow turning even softer, “but you’ll get used to it quickly.” She blinked at him, slow, angling her head at him. “It—he’s your brother, Austin. Everything is going to be just fine.”

It was exactly what he had tried to tell himself just a few minutes earlier, when he waiting for them to come get him. And it was no more comforting hearing it from her mouth out loud rather than just in his mind. But—but, and yet, she was just gazing up at him so earnestly, so _pleadingly_ , even. And Austin could see that she was silently begging him to just _be okay_. To be the son she didn’t have to worry about in all of this. So all he did was, again, force his mouth to twist up into something that resembled an expression of happiness.

And perhaps she bought it, bought the mask he donned right there in front of her, because then, she reached out and took his hands in hers, her crinkled eyes going shiny with mist all at once.

“It’s truly a miracle,” she murmured to him, the very same words she had spoken in the voicemail she had left for him. “God was with him in that surgery, I’m sure of it. He brought our Stewart back to us.”

Austin’s hands felt like two limp fish in her grasp, and he couldn’t quite look her straight-on in the eye. He just—he didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to say to that. If god was really with Stewart, then why did he get into that goddamn car accident in the first place? Why did his heart give out during surgery and require an entire team of surgeons to bring him back from the grave? And why was he now sitting in a room in the ICU with over half of his body having up and vanished if god was supposedly _watching over him?_ It was a meaningless platitude, was what it was, and Austin was almost upset that she would even dare utter those words to his face. But then again, she already knew how he felt about that sort of thing, and so too in turn did he already know how _she_ felt about it. And he would be an asshole to stomp on something that was only bringing her comfort, so he just reluctantly elected to keep his thoughts to himself.

And at last, to Austin’s great relief, his mother finally let go of him, taking a step back to stand in line with his father. “Well,” she said, “your father and I are going to go get lunch now, I think. It’ll probably be a while, so there’s no rush at all. You can stay as long as you want. Visiting hours for the ICU end at four, I believe. Alright?”

Another one of those expectant smiles. But Austin had run out of energy to keep on faking it; his mask had already started to crack and crumble, after not even a full minute of use. And all he could do was dip his head slowly, so painfully slowly, back at her in reply. But she and his father had already turned away and set out on the trek back down the hallway, hand-in-hand, leaving Austin just standing there in front of Stewart’s door. Standing there all alone, his fate set firmly in the palms of his own hands.

And he continued to stand there, unmoving, for what seemed to him like eons. His legs were shaking slightly by that point, and his mind was playing back a loop of the surgeon’s monologue from the previous morning. Trying, in vain, to steel himself for what was on the other side of that inch-and-a-half of wood.

Finally, when he thought he had scraped up all of the meager courage he had in him, he took in a shallow, shuddering mouthful of air. The world went fuzzy at its edges as he slowly lifted his fist to the door and knocked once, hesitantly. Then, his trembling fingers found the metal handle, painfully cold against his skin, and eased the door open, taking a faltering step forward over the threshold.

And when Austin lifted his eyes, there he was, lying halfway reclined in the center of a small hospital bed.

Stewart.

And though Austin had tried so hard to ready himself—though he had explicitly known the severity of the trauma, the outcome of the procedure, the vast extent of everything that had gone wrong—nothing could have truly prepared him for the sight before him that instantly ripped through his skull like paper.

Stewart was little more than misshapen patchwork of skin, bandages, and bronze metal plates. A disgusting mockery of the person Austin had once known. There was so much wrong with him that Austin almost didn’t know what to focus on first. He was like one of those spot the difference puzzles, except the difference was _every fucking thing about him_.

His arms.

They were resting limply in his lap. His right was pale, crosshatched with scrapes and blooming with dark bruises. An IV tube protruded from the back of his hand, coiling upwards into a wrinkled bag of fluid hung from a stand. And as for his left—it was nothing more than a chaotic mismatch of parts screwed into to an artificial socket. Long, bronze pipes where there used to be skin and bone. Copper ball joints standing in for organic ones. And articulated, mechanical fingers attached to a flat palm covered in bolts. Fingers stiff and inflexible, gleaming beneath the fluorescent hospital lights.

His chest.

It swelled with his breathing, the metal of his torso. The edges of the individual plates were plainly visible through the thin hospital gown draped over him. They were layered up his side, meshing dissonantly and jaggedly with his remaining skin. Weaving along the curves of his body, up and over his collarbone. Folded around where his shoulder used to be. Climbing the side of his stitched-up throat and reaching—

—His face. God, fuck, his _face_.

Half of it was just…gone. Bisected completely. And what was there in its place was a horrific mosaic of cold, lifeless metal. The plates had been molded in a clear attempt to mirror the bone structure that used to be. To match the single cheek and jawline still remaining. But it was wrong, it was all wrong. Nauseatingly wrong. A soft, familiar visage melted together with that of an utter stranger into a completely inhuman amalgamation.

His cheek, his ear, his nose, even part of his lips—all of it had been sliced away. Sliced away and remade again in shiny bronze. Dozens of screws lined the edges where the plates intersected, the seams holding him together. And where his left eye and lid used to be was just a dark copper sphere. A marble set deep into a massive socket and secured in place with several small, circular plates, like a bullet that had lodged itself in the middle of him. And from within a pinhole in the marble’s very center shone a faint, red light. A red light that beamed down unblinkingly, unmovingly. Lifelessly.

And it—

It was so much worse than Austin ever could have imagined.

He could hardly process it all. The metal. The skin. The jagged boundary where they met. His mind almost refused to let it sink in. He wanted to put out his eyes. He didn’t want to have to see it anymore—this nightmarish _thing_ that they were telling him was his brother.

No, it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be really him. They were wrong, they were lying, they made a mistake. Something. Something had gone wrong. This—this half-robot, half-man abomination—it couldn’t really be Stewart. He had seen Stewart just yesterday morning. He had seen him. He really did. He had seen him, and he still had a face. And an arm. And a body and an eye and heart and—

Stewart looked up and saw Austin standing there.

And time, for an instant, skidded to a halt.

Austin felt every part of himself go absolutely, purely, completely still. His legs were rocks. His blood was ice. Even his heart itself went paralyzed halfway through a beat. All he could do was stare forward, rotting away from the inside out, riveted in place by Stewart’s mismatched eyes from across the insurmountable abyss of space that separated them.

And Stewart stared back. He seemed…startled, almost. Or, the real half of his face did, at least. The plates of his left side shifted slightly, the metal bending in an approximation of what his skin could have done had it still been there. But the bionics were impossible to read. There was no true emotion in the metal of them, none at all. And all the while, the tiny red light in his mechanical eye bored right through Austin’s soul, cutting him instantly to shreds like a laser.

Then, as time began to pick itself back up again, Austin’s decaying heart somehow mustering the strength to start pulsing once more, he saw Stewart slowly, delicately tilt his head to the side.

“Austin,” he said, all at once. And Austin felt something else inside of him snap and die away.

Because that—that was not the voice of his older brother.

It was, but it wasn’t.

Someone had cut away half of it. Ground it down until it was stiff and flat, and then pasted it back over the remainder again. And the result was a layer of pure, tinny, _metal_ underscoring every sound that left his mouth. A tone that was part human and part machine. Like he was speaking through a cheap microphone or a bad internet connection.

Except he wasn’t. He was sitting right there, ten feet in front of Austin, still just looking up at him with that hollow, quiet, slightly confused expression adorning the right side of his face. After a second, his shoulders, one fair and soft, the other hard and metallic, rose slightly with a deep inhale.

And, “Austin?” he repeated, quieter, yet every syllable grating like the grind of metal spoon against a plate. A question, this time, rather than an observation. Austin jolted hard, as if he had just come back to his body from somewhere far off in the universe. At some point, he had ripped his gaze away, he realized, pointing it instead at the edge of the wall off to the side. And as he forced himself to finally return it to Stewart once more, he swallowed, and it burned. It burned like fire up his esophagus, searing through his mouth, scorching his teeth and reducing his tongue to ash.

“Hi,” he said, after a long, long moment. Even just the single word was agony.

But, apparently, it was what Stewart wanted, because his posture relaxed just slightly, and the knit in his eyebrows— _eyebrow_ , singular—smoothed out. And he sat back, leaning against the lumpy hospital pillow tucked behind him, at the base of his back.

“Hey,” he replied almost pleasantly, lowering his chin in a faint nod and blinking up at Austin with his one remaining eyeball. As if this were a casual meeting, him coming in the front door after getting home from work and kicking off his work boots and ambling into the living room just like he always did.

Just like he was meant to, yesterday.

It took everything Austin had just to take a step forward. And to follow that one with another, and another, slowly dragging himself out of the relative safety of the doorway and into the cold, unfamiliarity of the room. He shuffled past the foot of Stewart’s bed, feeling Stewart’s stare hanging on him the entire time, and at last lowered himself unsteadily into a small, plastic chair that had been dragged over to the bedside. He tucked his hands together between his knees, his stare trained hard on a particular wrinkle in the bedspread, and drew in a breath that felt like shards of frozen glass against his lungs.

“H—how are you?” he forced out at last, the words horribly thin, no meat or substance or meaning behind them at all.

It felt like the stupidest question possible—it was pretty fucking obvious how Stewart was—but wasn’t that what people asked when they visited someone in the hospital? And besides, he didn’t know what the hell else he was supposed to be doing. There was no script for this. There was no etiquette. Nobody ever taught you how to react something like this. Austin was flying blind, and he was absolutely fucking terrified.

But Stewart was silent for a stretch, seeming to genuinely consider the question. “…In pain,” he answered at last. As bronzy as the left half of the lips that shaped around it. “Everything hurts. And I’m exhausted. I feel like I was, well…”

He trailed off, his mouth twisting. And it was obvious what he wasn’t saying: _I feel like I was hit by a truck_. After a brief pause, though, he continued on:

“Man. They had me on some crazy painkillers last night, let me tell you. Well, still do, but—but the dosage was a lot higher before. I feel bad, actually. Mom kept trying to talk to me when she and Dad first came in to see me, but I was just lying there absolutely as high as a kite.” He let out a noise, sort of hissy and abrupt. “But yeah. I guess…I guess I’m mostly alright, really. Considering.”

“Yeah,” Austin mumbled.

There was very, very long pause. Austin’s hands were shaking, still clamped hard between his legs. His vision blurred for a fraction of an instant, his eyes burning somewhere deep within the sockets. And then, tremblingly, tentatively, he finally lifted his gaze to take in Stewart again.

And it was less of a shock, the second time, but only just.

Really, seeing him up close like that was a completely different sort of terror altogether. It wasn’t sharp, sudden, the split-second explosion of stepping through a doorway to find half of the person you used to know lying destroyed in a hospital bed. But, rather, it was something of a slow burn. A shockwave that you could see coming from miles away but that still tore you apart when it finally struck you.

It was just…bad. It was so bad. There were hardly even words to describe the awfulness of it. Stewart was just so _cobbled together_ , carved up like a fucking Thanksgiving turkey laid out on a platter. The still-human parts of him were deeply marred, marked all over with scrapes and scratches and stitched up cuts. Part of his head had been shaved, even, bearing only faint stubble and a jagged, puckered incision wound like a fault line across his scalp. And, of course, even worse, there were the plates. The metal plates pasted onto him, shoved up in line with his skin and bolted into place. Darkly inhuman in the worst of ways, not even pretending to be anything other than they were. And it was so prominent, so stark, so incongruous, the difference between the two halves of him, that it was as if it were two separate pictures that had been sloppily cut out and pasted together. It was a vivid line of division, a line that separated the old Stewart from the new. A physical manifestation of the before and the after, one scraped and bruised and sutured and still barely clinging to life, and the other immortalized in pristine bronze.

And Austin felt a violent, mounting sort of sickness curdling of him as he sat there and just continued to stare at Stewart, purely unable to tear his eyes away now that he had started, no matter how much he longed to. He stared and stared and stared, feeling terror rise inside of him, slow and steady like bile, as he took it all in. Stewart’s wrought-metal arm, just stiff, hollow pipes with only empty space between them. His plated torso, melding with the thin curve of his chest. And his copper eye, frozen in a perpetual, lidless stare into the abyss. And his face.

And his face.

Austin could almost fill in, mentally, the other half of Stewart’s face that was meant to be there. The face with soft cheeks and downturned lips and smiley hazel-green eyes. The face that he _knew_ , that he _had known_ for his entire life up until that point. And the denial of the features he anticipated, the reception of a blank, dead-eyed, metal armature instead, the repeated realization of it that refused to fully sink in, was this wave of icy dread that rushed over him again and again and again and again, like the unchanging, ever-flowing tides.

What stage of grief was this? he wondered faintly, from somewhere dissociated from himself. Denial, perhaps. But it didn’t feel like denial. He—he _wanted_ it to be denial. He _wanted_ to deny it, but it refused to be pushed away so easily. And so he just sat. He sat and he looked and he felt himself slowly dying inside, his whole abdomen pulled taut with these great, unending jolts of terror.

And then, in a burst, without thinking or hesitating or anything at all, he blurted, “What’s it…like?”

His voice came out loud, far too loud for the quiet, white-walled space. As if he was trying to drown out the sound of his own thoughts, a stifled jumble of screamed-out words that had been running on without ever even a pause since his mother first called him yesterday afternoon. And Stewart turned, slowly, those mismatched eyes swiveling over towards him again.

“…What do you mean?” he asked. And Austin once again had to repress a shudder at the metallicity of his timbre.

“I—”

Truthfully, Austin didn’t know what he meant either. Or, rather, he didn’t know why the hell he was even asking. He didn’t want to know. Mother of god, did he not want to know. It was already bad enough just looking at it. But he had already said it, so he couldn’t back out now.

“—It,” he finished lamely. “Everything. Your…the…”

But he couldn’t spit out the words. He didn’t even _have_ the words to begin with. Fortunately, though, Stewart seemed to immediately pick up on what he meant.

“Oh.” He offered a tiny nod, no more than a small dip of his chin. “Yeah. I—it’s…it’s different. Hard. There’s…there’s a lot to get used to.” His gaze flicked down to his lap where his hands still lay, his fingers interlocked just the slightest bit. Pale skin resting against vibrant metal. Austin saw his mechanical eye shift slightly in the socket. “Honestly, I—I don’t really…I don’t know,” he murmured. “I feel like I haven’t had a lot of time to think about any of this. It’s all been so…fast.”

Austin didn’t respond to that. It stood for itself, he thought. Nothing more needed to be added.

For a minute or so, neither of them spoke. But it wasn’t a comfortable silence in the slightest. No, it pressed in hard against Austin, slowly flattening him under its weight. He felt like he needed to say something, that he was _supposed_ to be saying something—if his mother was here, after all, she wouldn’t have let either of them so much have the opportunity to even breathe—but he had nothing else in him. Slowly, he slid his phone out of his pocket to check it, hoping for a message or something to distract him, but there was nothing. Just the time on the lock screen staring up at him.

 _One thirty-seven_.

…God. He’d barely been in the hospital for ten minutes. And he’d been sitting here in Stewart’s room for probably less than four. And yet he was already this emotionally drained.

Jesus fucking christ.

After another moment, he sat back in his chair, folding his leg across his opposite knee. And he tipped his head backwards, shutting his eyes tightly. The darkness behind his lids was relieving, but only in a vague sense. His heart throbbed hard with a fervent anxiety that he could feel gnawing away at him from the inside out like acid.

“…I think—the eye’s been the hardest thing, I think, so far.”

Stewart’s voice, then, came without warning, although he was speaking softly. And it took Austin longer than it should have to remember what the hell he was even talking about. But oh, yes, the eye. _The eye._

And when Austin let his own slide open once more, he found Stewart looking at him again, head now resting sideways on the pillow. At that angle, the missing half of his face was almost fully concealed, and if Austin didn’t stare for too long, it was almost like he was normal again. Like nothing had ever happened.

Stewart’s gaze was uplifted in a way that suggested he was waiting for Austin to reply, so Austin mustered up a muted sound that was little more than a grunt, just to keep him going. Because on one hand, he hated this. He hated this so much. He wanted to crawl out of his own skin, to leap out the window next to him to his doom, anything to keep himself from being swallowed alive by everything that happening around him. But on the other hand, the more Stewart talked, the less he had to. And that was something, at least. Not much, but something. The only thing he really had.

“…Yeah,” Stewart went on after a beat, just as Austin had hoped. “The—uh, this bionic eye—it’s not like a real eye, he told me. The doctor.” His Adam’s apple bobbed with his swallow. Austin wondered if that, at least, was still real, or it too had been made over in metal, no more than a lump of bronze lodged in his throat. “It doesn’t see the same way a regular eye does. It’s not…I dunno. It doesn’t really see in color like an actual eye. It’s sort of…it sees shape but not detail, is how it is, I guess. So my vision’s pretty weird right now. Looking at two totally different things in each eye, y’know? And it’s really been giving me a headache.”

He lifted his arms, then, waving his hands in sort of a back-and-forth gesture to indicate the unevenness of his sight. And, watching him, Austin’s mouth went as dry and shriveled as sand. Because it was the first time Austin had seen him actually move the mechanical arm, had seen him move _any_ of his metal body parts, really, except for perhaps the simulated skin of his face. And—and it—

—Perhaps, in the back of his mind, Austin had expected something more.

After all, this was supposedly cutting-edge technology—replacing skin and organs and a million other things en masse with metal replicas. Bringing victims of horrible accidents back from the brink and molding them a new life in bronze. Wasn’t it supposed to be top-of-the-line? Pushing the very boundaries of what medicine was capable of? Not just functional, but _perfect_ in every way?

But it wasn’t. Not at all. Where Stewart’s real hand and arm glided through the air, an easy, natural, _trivial_ sort of motion, the other—

It—

It stuttered.

That was the only way Austin could think to describe how it moved. Which was stiff, piecemeal, lagging far, far behind its flesh and blood sibling. One geared joint rotating at a time, like an assembly-line machine. The layered pieces of the mail clunking together, scraping horribly at his hollowed shoulder socket. Not loose or smooth or effortless like it should have been. Not like a real arm in any way at all.

No, like a nightmare. Like a nightmare.

It was a nightmare.

Everything about this was a pure fucking nightmare.

 _A metal brain doesn’t work the same as a real one_ , is what the surgeon had said to them just last night. And he was right. But yet, he wasn’t quite right _enough_ , it seemed, because what Austin was finally realizing—the full, complete truth that was dawning on him at last—was that a metal _anything_ would never be as good as the real thing it was meant to stand in for. You couldn’t replace human skin and bone and muscle and _life_ with machines, not without giving up all that beautiful life and leaving it to shrivel and die.

There was so much of Stewart that had been irreparably lost in the accident. And they were fools, all of them, to have clung to the naïve hope that they could have rescued him with those bionics. Really, it was just as the surgeon said: Fifty-four percent of him was unsalvageable. Fifty-four percent of him was, by definition, unable to be restored. Those doctors had to give up on it and cut it away from him entirely. They hadn’t _cured_ him or _fixed_ him or _solved_ anything. All they did was dream up a contrived workaround to keep him from bleeding out and dying. Or, that is, dying any worse than he already had.

This wasn’t salvation. This wasn’t a miracle. This was no work of god. This wasn’t a success. It was a failure, through and through. Proof of a catastrophic disaster. And now they were stuck with it. They were stuck with it forever. The Stewart of just yesterday was well and truly gone, and there was nothing any of them could do about it other than gawk into his face at the bare evidence of everything that had gone so wrong.

Stewart was still talking— _had_ been talking that entire time, but Austin could barely hear him anymore. He felt like he was falling. Like he really had thrown himself out the window and was left tumbling headlong towards the cold, unforgiving earth. And he was trembling so much harder now, sort of mindlessly clawing at the hem of his own shirt, as if that could have saved him from this.

Then, rather suddenly, Stewart trailed off in his speaking. He leaned forward slightly, lifting himself off the pillow, that metallic half of his face revealing itself once more. The pinhole light of his left eye flashed at Austin, and the plates forming the angle of his jaw shifted.

“…What?” he said quietly, almost hesitantly, rasping out with the hush.

 _What_ , indeed.

Austin stared woodenly back at him. It took him far too long to gather himself together from where he had been mentally splattered across the floor enough to even process the question lying within the word. And slowly, unsteadily, he lifted a finger, pointing.

“Why—” it came out feeble, “—why does your arm do that?”

Stewart’s lips parted, but for a moment, no sound came out at all. His eyes cut away from Austin’s and flicked down to his mechanical arm, pressing his fingertips to the bronze pipes that acted as some sort of a bicep.

“…Oh,” he answered. “Yeah. That—that’s going to get better with time, they said.” He peeked up at Austin again, his brow knitting. “A—a lot of stuff is apparently going to get better.”

“How.”

It was not a question. It was definitely not a question. And Stewart looked almost alarmed by it, his face going slack and his shoulders rising up defensively. It was the first true emotion Austin had seen from him, something other than the near-total inscrutability he had worn up until then. It didn’t make Austin feel even the slightest bit better.

“I—I mean, well…like you saw, I don’t—I don’t have a lot of control over the metal parts yet,” Stewart began, his voice wavering a tad. “Right now is the worst of it, supposedly, ‘cause my nerves—they’re not used to it at all. They’re not fully… _hooked up_ , I guess, like they will be.” His mouth pursed just slightly, just barely noticeably. “So all the metal stuff is partially paralyzed; I can move it, sort of, but it’s hard. And with my arm, the joints and stuff—they don’t work like in a regular arm, so even then, it’s…different. It’s a different way of movement that I’m going to have to learn.”

Perhaps as if to demonstrate, he flexed the fingers of his left hand. Austin watched silently as they slowly, painstakingly clunked outwards until they were fully extended, lying flat against the blankets. Like the fingers of an elderly person, stiff and jerky and halfway out of control. Then, reaching out, Stewart laid his opposite palm across the back of what seemed to be his knuckle joints, his thumb rubbing across the bronze plate that formed the widest part of his hand.

“I also can’t feel anything at all, with the metal,” he continued eventually, still soft, tapping his fingers gently against the plate with a _clink, clink, clink_. “But they said that as my body gets used to the bionics, I’ll regain pretty much my full sense of touch. Pain, pressure, temperature, all of that, more or less just like my real skin was. Even though it’s all just a bunch of metal.”

He glanced up at Austin again. His hair was falling into his face. And he looked so incredibly worn out, with bags beneath bloodshot eyes— _eye_ —and slightly overgrown facial hair. But there was still, somehow, a strange sort of tranquility deep within the colors of his right iris. A sereneness that Austin almost flinched to see.

“They…they told me that I’m going to be the same as I was before,” he murmured, his face smoothing out into something much gentler. “I mean, aside from the surface-level stuff; they can’t really do anything about how I look. But my ability to function will be all the same. I won’t have to live any differently.” And his hand lifted, moving from his other arm up to his face, fingertips grazing along the metallic edge of his jawline. “It’s hard to believe, but—but look at all that they’ve done for me already. It’s…really pretty neat, isn’t it?”

 _Neat_.

That wasn’t really the way Austin would have described what was happening. Not at all. And at it reverberated in the depths of his skull, he felt something inside of him begin to curdle.

He—

He was so lost. He didn’t understand this. He didn’t understand any of this fucking shit at all. It felt like _everyone_ seemed to think that this was an optimal outcome except for him—the surgeon, his parents, Dean, every single person other than him himself. He felt as if he was maybe the only one in the entire _universe_ who could see the whole fuckshow for what it was. And hearing that sort of blind, piggish optimism from even Stewart too filled him with a strange, roiling emotion that crashed against his ribs like turbulent waves.

But, all the same, he swallowed it back down before it could overflow, holding it in his lungs, allowing himself to just suffocate in silence. And, once the thrash of the sea within him settled down to a subdued churn, he nodded slowly, belatedly.

“I guess.”

He stared forward at Stewart for a moment more, not quite meeting his gaze, but instead fixing again upon his metal plates. The smaller ones that formed the left side of his face down to his chin like tessellated tiles. The larger, folded, convex ones wrapped around the side of neck, each struck through with a deep groove across its center. The wrought, carefully-shaped ones that made up the rest of him, his shoulder and clavicle and chest and stomach. And beneath that, the ones that Austin couldn’t even see. His ribs and his windpipe and his vocal cord. Broken and patched up insides to so perfectly match his utterly ruined outsides.

And yet, certainly, even _that_ was merely scraping the surface. Austin actually couldn’t remember everything the doctor had listed off the previous night, every piece of the lost fifty-four percent, his memory grown foggy with stress and trauma. But he knew that there was more. He knew that there was so much more. Nine hours’ worth of body parts and organs removed and tossed in some dumpster to be hauled away. Nine hours of reconstruction, nine hours of hard, back-breaking work gone into this absolute atrocity of a creation. Slowly, Austin slouched forward in his chair, resting his forearms on his knees and tipping his chin into his chest.

“How—how far do they go down?” he bit out roughly, like gravel. “The metal. Plates.”

Just the words alone made him feel ill. And again, it wasn’t a question he particularly wanted the answer to, but his morbid curiosity was too great to simply let it be.

“… _Down?_ ” Stewart paused. “Uh. I mean, you’re looking at most of it. My legs are basically all the same. I’m the opposite of Lucah, I guess.” He made a strange sound that Austin guessed might have been supposed to be a snort. “But, yeah. The only stuff that low is really just some of my upper thigh, and maybe a little bit of my knee. And part of my femur bone, too, I think, they said. But the rest of it’s all above the belt. Face and arm and—”

But he cut himself off, gesturing sharply to the whole of his torso with one hand.

“…You know.”

He hovered there for a beat or three, his hand—his _real_ hand—poised in the air, fingers crooked inwards like sort-of claws. His eye narrowed, and the muscles and metal around his mouth tensed, and a sort of wry, sour cloud passed over him, shadowing him. And slowly, almost languidly, he looked down at the blankets bunched up around his waist, at the vague form of his legs beneath the wrinkled covers.

“I’m still—I can still…have kids, supposedly, they told me. That’s one part of me that didn’t get messed up, I guess,” he said, low, and then, like a shot, he barked out a laugh. It was a harsh, metallic noise that grated against Austin, nothing like the pleasant, featherlight giggle he used to have. Another familiar part of him, gone, torn away from him in the accident. And Austin’s gut flooded with a shot of anxiety that left him almost winded as it twisted through his veins.

A second passed, and Stewart tacked on, “The _only_ one, it seems like. This is all just so—Lord.” He sighed, lifting his real fingers to his scalp and running them heavily through his half-shaved tawny hair. “I—I don’t know how the hell I’m alive, honestly.”

Understatement of the century. So much so that it was _Austin’s_ turn to want to laugh. But he didn’t, and neither did Stewart say anything else, and for what felt like the thousandth time since Austin stepped into the room, silence fell between them.

This whole conversation, if it could even be considered one at all, was nothing short of horribly stilted, and it was obvious that they both knew so. But neither of them seemed to want to acknowledge it directly. Not Stewart, who had fallen back tiredly against his pillow, his real eye fluttered shut and his mechanical one staring out blankly at the wall, looking as if all of his strength had left him at once. And _definitely_ not Austin, who had all but turned to stone in his plastic chair by Stewart’s bedside.

He didn’t even know what he was feeling anymore. It was just so much. So much all at once. The accident. The phone call. The hospital. The waiting room. The surgeon. The bionics. And Stewart. Stewart lying there half-dead, half-alive. Half-metal, half-flesh. All of it. He barely had time to process one thing before something new came along on its heels. And he felt, all of a sudden, like he had become so full up, so overloaded, so much like a thimble left to runneth over, that he was beginning to shut down entirely.

He didn’t know what the fuck to say to Stewart. He really, really didn’t. Was he supposed to say sorry? Was he supposed to ask him what it was like to wake up with half of your fucking body gone? Was he supposed to be his emotional support and tell him to _express his feelings_ or what the fuck ever? Because he couldn’t do that. He _wouldn’t_ do that. He was in no shape to do anything for anyone. He was here, he had seen Stewart, just like his parents wanted, and he hated everything about it. Wasn’t that enough?

Honestly, he was kicking himself for not just sucking it up last night and waiting around to visit Stewart along with his parents. Then his loss for words wouldn’t have been so noticeable. He could have faded into the background and let his parents do all the talking. And perhaps the shock of seeing Stewart for the first time would have been mitigated by not walking into it alone; his parents seemed utterly unbothered by the whole thing, after all. They were totally fine with their son being turned into some kind of bronze cyborg freak. They had no problem with that at all.

Apparently.

Slowly, gingerly, Austin let his head sink forward, pressing his face into his hands. His fingers dug into the skin just above his eyebrows, his breath echoing loud in the confined space of his palms. From outside, beyond the open doorway, he heard the faint sound of approaching footsteps clicking against tile, and his heart leapt, thinking it might have been his parents returning. But the footsteps simply passed on by the room without even slowing, fading off into the distance down the other end of the hallway. And then there was nothing again, nothing but his own, listless breathing.

Then, out of the very corner of his eye, through a gap in his fingers, Austin noticed something. He turned, letting his hands fall back down limply into his lap, to see an overflowing bouquet of flowers sitting on the windowsill to his right—a gift from their mother, no doubt. They were clearly fake, the bright white sunlight playing on the seams of the fabric that made up the leaves and petals, which was somewhat odd, but Austin just chalked it up to some sort of hospital rule against real plants. And he was triply glad, then, that he had just decided to bring a card himself.

And oh, the card, he remembered. He might as well give it to Stewart now. At least that would give them something to do, to talk about, to while away the time until their parents came back from lunch and rescued him. Except—

 _Oh_ , the card.

He’d left it in the car by accident.

Fuck.

…But whatever. It sucked anyway. He’d—he’d just…figure it out later. Bring it in some other time. Because god knew he was going to be back here probably every fucking day. Jesus.

“Austin?”

The sound of Stewart’s voice yanked him from his thoughts. And he looked over, tensely, to find Stewart gazing at him again. Stewart was still lying down, melting into the pillow beneath his head, raw fatigue written all over him. His eyelid was drooping, giving a very lopsided, almost intoxicated slant to his face.

“What?” Austin said slowly.

“It’s nice to see you,” he murmured, so soft that it was almost just a whisper. “I…missed you. Last night.”

And Austin felt something inside of him startle. His skin prickled in a way he couldn’t quite explain, like the feeling of a spider crawling across his wrist, except it was a million spiders all over his body at the very same time, their hairy legs ghosting over him and their fangs bared and dripping poison. He repressed a shiver, quashing it down into the depths of his spine. “I—” he started rather abruptly, the beginnings of the phrase he was meant to answer with:

 _I missed you too_.

But it wouldn’t come out. He could feel it there, could feel it rolling and wadding in the center of his windpipe, but the words were just…stuck. Lodged there in his throat, refusing to allow themselves to be spit out. And they burned there, a flame pressed up to him, scalding down his flesh and charring away the bone.

Stewart had propped himself slightly more upwards then, leaning on his good arm and regarding Austin with a tinge of expectance—of concern, even. His mechanical eye flickered, scanning Austin with that crimson red laser light. And under his stare, Austin’s chest contorted with a fast, hard, lightning sort of pain, like each of his ribs were being snapped one after another in rapid succession. And he looked away.

“I—I was tired,” he said quietly, the words unexpectedly coming out tinged with barbs.

And, in that instant, something passed between the two of them. A sharp, fizzling sensation, like a fraying rope being stretched to its limit and then splitting apart all at once. Stewart drew back, sitting fully upright now with a sort of sharpness, his back hunching and his hand instead reaching up to fiddle with the neckline of his gown.

“Oh, yeah,” he mumbled at last, “I know, I wasn’t—” The plates of his face shifted. “I just mean that I’m glad you’re here now.”

“Okay.”

For a moment, the two of them simply looked at each other. Stewart’s chin was lowered slightly, his eye almost betraying the multitudes of thoughts undoubtedly racing through his mind. But Austin was quite the opposite; he thought as little as he felt, which was absolutely nothing at all. He was empty, like a cup of water that had been knocked to the floor. Like a canvas whose paint had been scraped away to blankness with the edge of a blade. And even if he had wanted to, there was nothing he could do about it. A hole had opened up in the center of his body, and every last bit of his organs, of his blood, of his emotions—all of it had come pouring out of him like a waterfall and was now lying in a puddle at his feet, a puddle of what used to be him.

“Austin?”

He jolted, slightly, jerking up. Again with his name. It felt like Stewart just wouldn’t stop saying it, wouldn’t stop trying to talk to him at all. And it was irrational, he knew, but suddenly he found himself wanting to snap at Stewart to just _stop_. Just give him a second to _think_ , jesus fucking christ.

But he didn’t. He just laced his fingers tightly together in his lap and waited. And in front of him, Stewart let out a long, thin exhale, folding his legs beneath the mountains and peaks of his blanket.

“Thank you,” he said, blinking slowly. Gazing at Austin in a way that made Austin’s muscles seize with the urge to recoil. “For coming to see me. It—” He paused, swallowed, folded in his lips. “It means a lot to me. Really.”

And then, he held out his arm. His real one, bruised and bandaged and scraped, with fingers grown strong and palms worn tough from his work, extended outwards in a gentle curve. And he cocked his head at Austin, his one eye softening and the corner of his mouth curving gently upwards. A smile weary, broken, misshapen, askew. But, nonetheless, despite the immobile metal that made up half of it, somehow genuine.

And it took Austin several beats too long to recognize what he was offering:

A hug.

An olive branch, a peace offering.

Something, no matter how small, to mend everything that had fallen to pieces around them. A candle’s light in the dead of night. Whistling on in the dark. A gesture, an anything, meant to reassure the both of them.

 _Everything_ _is going to be okay_ , Stewart was saying with his eyes, with his smile, with his arm outstretched. Except—no, not quite. It wasn’t that certain. It wasn’t that confident. It was a veneer, a flimsy sense of certainty gilded over top of everything that had happened in the span of a single day. No, there was a question mark there, trailing along at the end, a few steps behind.

_Everything is going to be okay…?_

And that, then, turned it from a simple statement, something to be almost taken for granted, into a monster of a question bearing down on Austin with teeth poised to strike. Because, he—he didn’t know. He didn’t know the answer. And he wished it was as simple as everyone seemed to make it out to be.

Stewart was alive, they said. He was stable. He could walk and talk and eat and sleep, and soon enough he would be completely back to normal. _I won’t have to live any differently,_ is how he himself even put it. But, yet, he had lost everything in the process. He had been pried from the crumpled remains of a car little more than a bloody, torn-up mess, with an arm hanging by a pulpy thread and a skull half-crushed in beyond all hope of repair. That fact couldn’t be erased. It was there, invulnerable and ever-present, hanging over them like a thousand-ton weight just waiting to drop.

There had been an accident. Nothing anyone said or did could change that. It didn’t matter how well they patched Stewart up or how easily he would be able to slip back into his old life. It would always be the case there had been an accident. It would always be the case that Stewart had been in that car when that truck in the next lane over swerved. It would always be the case that his—that _their_ —lives had been changed forever. No number of bronze plates could shape that away.

And that, truly, was what made Austin feel like he was suffocating on nothing.

 _Is everything going to be okay?_ his mind whispered at him, almost taunting him with it, Stewart’s silent words rephrased. And Austin gulped down, in vain, at the everything that had clamped around his throat, strangling him until he saw spots.

 _I…don’t know,_ he whispered back at last, a curtain of coldness falling down over him.

 _I don’t know_.

His mouth suddenly felt very strange. His entire self felt strange, actually; it had this whole time. He felt, vaguely, like a tourist in someone else’s life. But Stewart was still looking at him, and his arm was still held out, and he was still waiting on that desperate answer to his olive branch, and—

—And Austin couldn’t not. He couldn’t not. He wasn’t so without a heart.

Slowly, he brought himself to his feet, smoothing out the rumpled hem of his t-shirt. He gazed down at Stewart, gazing back up at him from the bed, and awkwardly, he leaned in, leaned down, gingerly wrapping his arms around Stewart’s middle. And Stewart did the same, matching Austin, looping his own arm around Austin’s back and allowing his head to rest heavily against his shoulder.

And they sat. Everything was quiet, and Austin could feel Stewart’s chest rising and falling against his. They were still, together, the two of them, and for a fleeting, gossamer instant, it was almost sort of nice.

Then, Austin heard a metallic clanking, followed by a quiet, breathy curse, and a moment later, Stewart’s left arm came up around him as well. But it was stiff, inflexible, the bars of his forearm pressing into Austin’s spine and his crooked, half-paralyzed fingers digging into Austin’s skin through his shirt. And Austin stared hard at the edge of the bed over Stewart’s shoulder, his stomach tightening again in that way he had come to be so familiar with in the past hours.

…Stewart had never been gentle, really. Had never been one for comfort, neither verbal nor physical. He cared about Austin, absolutely, but he never really chose those particular ways to show it. Not usually, that is. But sometimes, every so often, he would give in. He would step outside of his typical self to indulge Austin. He would reach out and offer the hug that was wanted of him.

And that meant something. It meant something to Austin that he would do that. His hugs, always, no matter how infrequent, were a source of solace to Austin. They were something that said _It’s okay_ or _I’ve got you_ or even just _I love you_. Something that spoke to him through simple touch alone. He was warm and soft and alive, with a heart that beat and lungs that exhaled and liquid blood that rushed through his veins, and his embrace always filled Austin with a sense of home, of childhood. Relics of the time when he really did rely on his big brother to protect him.

But now—

But now.

Now, it was different. So horrifically different. Those soft, loving, _human_ parts of him had been stripped away and replaced with unfeeling metal plates. And there were no unspoken words in any of them. There was no longer any of that comfort or solace that Austin had once sought out. Not in Stewart’s side under Austin’s palm, not in his face pressed into Austin’s shoulder, not in his hand curled against Austin’s back. None of it. All it was was cold, dark, hollow. Like holding a piece of scrap metal in your arms, hard and unyielding, but weak and unloving at the very same time.

And then, as Austin stood there, arms still looped around Stewart uncomfortably, his jaw held painfully tight and his gut swimming in a pool of his own soul, he heard something. A faint sound emerging through the blanket of silence around them, a sound that grew louder as he turned his focus towards it. It was a deep, low, muted sort of rumbling. A rapid, shuddery banging, swaying back and forth in a steady rhythm.

_Cling._

_Clang._

_Cling._

_Clang_.

And Austin realized, with a start, as the noise wove into the folds of his mind, that it was coming from not somewhere beyond the walls of the room, not from some other place deeper in the depths of the ICU.

No, it was emanating from _within_ Stewart himself. 

Austin felt himself go rigid, all of his muscles pulling taut and his blood stuttering in his veins. You—you’re ticking,” he choked out, deathly quiet, his pulse like a gunshot in the shell of his ears.

Stewart shifted slightly. “…What?”

“Inside you.” His eyes were dry. He blinked hard against them, but it did nothing. “I heard…noises. Rattling. Metal.”

“Oh.”

It was no more than a whisper. A whisper abrupt and stilted. And there was a pause that went on for just a hair longer than was natural.

“…Oh. Yeah,” Stewart finished, then. “Right. That’s—” And he shifted again, shivering, almost, with a strange sort of squirm. “That’s my heart.”

His heart.

The heart, bruised and battered and broken, that had given out and killed him on the operating table. The heart that was taken from him to save his life, resuscitated and then ripped out of him and disposed of altogether. And replaced with the _new_ heart that now sat within his chest cavity, little more than a hollow hunk of bronze through which somehow still flowed blood.

And as if he could have read Austin’s thoughts, Stewart continued on:

“It—I don’t—I don’t really understand how it works, but—but it runs on gears now.” His words were somewhat muffled, projected down into the bunched-up fabric of Austin’s shirt. “That’s how it stays going. _Sprockets_ , I think the doctor said they were. So…” He drew in a breath. “That’s what my heartbeat sounds like now. Or, kind of. There’s nothing to actually _beat_ anymore. It’s just the sprockets turning…I—I guess.”

Stewart fell silent again. Austin stood there, body limp and slack. And, all at once, Stewart’s arms felt like a vise around him. Constricting him, crushing him, squeezing all of the air from his deprived, dried-out lungs. And, with a sudden sense of franticness, he jerked away, tearing his hands away from Stewart and yanking out of the embrace with far too much force. He took a wobbly step backwards, the back of his legs hitting the edge of his chair.

And he stared at Stewart.

He stared, and his torso, his breast, his throat, his skull—every inch of his body flooded to its very top with that same, overwhelming, burning sensation from before. Except stronger. A lot stronger. Strong enough that he felt his hands go balling into tight, shaking fists by his sides, his nerve endings feeling all off-kilter.

He couldn’t hear it. He couldn’t really hear it. He knew it. He was too far away from Stewart now for that to be possible. But yet, he could. It was there, in his mind, trapped like an everlasting echo. The sound of Stewart’s heart—of the _gears_ , the clang of their metal teeth clashing together as they turned. And he couldn’t _stop_ hearing it. It swelled around him, trapping him in a vortex of it, growing louder and louder within the confines of his own head until it was near-deafening. He shrank back, his knees turned to jelly and his arms wrapping tightly around himself, his breath coming in almost-gasps now.

_Cling._

_Clang._

_Cling._

_Clang_.

Through the haze, he felt that Stewart was watching him intently. Stewart didn’t speak, not at first, but Austin knew he had to know. He had to know what Austin was thinking. There was no way he didn’t, no way he couldn’t tell. And slowly, then, his mouth twisted, and his one lid went fluttering shut, pinching tightly for only a moment.

“Austin, I—” he started. He looked down, his fingers pressing into his legs, his features sort of crumpling. “I’m sorry.”

He’s _sorry_. Sorry for _what?_ Austin wondered frantically. Sorry for _what?_

“I know this is…a lot, but…”

And then, once more, he lifted his eyes, one hazel and one red-pupiled copper reaching out for Austin’s two green. Their gazes met, connecting hard, and Austin understood the look on Stewart’s face immediately for what it was. Which was a plea. A plea, raw. A plea that ached with every word. Stewart was all but begging him to understand, to be okay with this, to accept things the way that they were. He was offering up an answer of his own to the question he himself had posited just minutes ago—e _verything_ _is going to be okay?_ An answer that differed from Austin’s in every shape and form.

“…But it’s still me,” Stewart finished softly, blinking slowly up at him. “I—it’s still me in here. I haven’t changed on the inside. I promise.”

But it was just so hard to believe him when every word he spoke came out in a voice garbled and hardened by metal.

**Author's Note:**

> And thus, we conclude part one of three of this story.
> 
> To clarify, McJones’s own left side of his body is the one with the bionics, so it would actually appear to other people looking at him as his right side. I didn’t really know how to naturally clarify that in the story, so I just decided to stick with referring to it as _his_ left side. 
> 
> Additionally on the topic of McJones's appearance in this fic—in truth, I wanted to save this for the very end of the story as a sort of grand finale to top it all off, but for clarity’s sake, I think it works better here. A while back I did this drawing of more or less what I imagine McJones looks like in this fic: [pov you are pbg.](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/752915987824902286/805390739806355466/the_sound_of_a_heart_aoaoao.jpg) I am not the best artist but I really did try my best to capture him! So hopefully that clears any confusions up there. 
> 
> Additionally, for the curious, the medical parts of this were all quite heavily researched. The bionics, obviously, are completely made up, but I spent a lot of time looking into the other stuff like myocardial contusions and whatnot to make sure it was all at least somewhat in the realm of possibility. 
> 
> And that's all I have to say for now, I believe. Again, thank you for reading, and please look out for part two soon!


End file.
